The Global Fertility Panic

So, what would it take to persuade you to have another baby? A big tax break? A monthly stipend? Free child care? A big house?

“I wouldn’t do that again for all the money in the world” is a perfectly reasonable answer. But be prepared: At some point, your government is going to pitch you on a larger family.

We have entered the age of the fertility panic. Country after country is discovering that smaller families are causing the population to shrink, which means more old people, and therefore higher government expenses and lower tax revenues. And many of those countries are then jumping to the wrong conclusion: that they should persuade people to have more kids.

The latest victim is the United States, which until recently was proud of its big, corn-fed families, but discovered last year that the economic crisis and constricted immigration have pushed its average family size down to 1.9 children, below the 2.1 needed for population stability.

This has led a number of American voices to propose what European countries have been doing for more than a decade and what Quebec has tried since the 1980s: attempting to create larger families through policy.

This theme has been seized upon most dramatically by the conservative author Jonathan Last, whose book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting created alarming headlines across America this week. He is not satisfied to warn of rising pension and health-care costs. “Declining populations have always followed or been followed by Very Bad Things. Disease. War. Economic stagnation or collapse. And these grim tidings from history may be in our future,” his first chapter warns. (He follows this by reassuring us that unlike the population-growth scaremongers of the 1970s, “I’m not selling doom.”)

Whether Mr. Last is selling doom or not might depend on your point of view, or your gender. From the end of the article:

The problem in the United States is that the people who are freaking out about fertility are those who tend to oppose immigration, working mothers and state spending. Mr. Last, the American author, squares this ideological circle with proposals that include raising university tuition fees to as much as $100,000 a year as a deterrent (because “higher education dampens fertility in all sorts of ways”), building highways so people can live in big suburban houses, and encouraging more religion, because the faithful are fecund.

This is all a tortured way of evading the real issue: economic health, which not only makes population shrinkage more affordable, but causes people to have more babies. Working women and higher education aren’t obstacles to solving the fertility problem – they’re major parts of the solution.

We should plan for the consequences of the individual choices that make up demographics, not try to force individuals into different choices.

Ban Abortion! prohibit contraception! Keep wimmins out of college and the workforce! They needs to be home making babies!

The United States, unlike Japan, is not facing a population decline anytime soon. There are hundreds of millions of people who want to immigrate to the US; all we have to do is make it a little easier to do so to keep our population growing at a healthy pace for a very long time to come.

“Declining populations have always followed or been followed by Very Bad Things. Disease. War. Economic stagnation or collapse. And these grim tidings from history may be in our future,”

I’m guessing it’s not quite that absolute, but it is a meaningless sentence anyway. “Followed or been followed by”? That’s a pretty broad brush he’s painting with. Once you eliminate things like the plague ravaging Europe or smallpox, etc. wiping out native Americans, which are completely irrelevant to the argument he is trying to make, you’re left with a rather small sample.
Furthermore, the population wasn’t declining last time I looked. (Oh, that population… well, carry on then.)
In any event, since we can effectively control fertility for the first time in history, we’re talking apples an oranges in any sort of parallel to 14th century Europe anyway.

God forbid the Earths human population come down to a reasonable enough level over the next 100 or so years to the point where famine could be a thing of the past through advanced agricultural technology.

Oh and a little thing called labor scarcity that could make sure people are paid what they are worth wouldn’t be so bad either.

These population decline concern trolls always come off in my minds eye as nothing more than corporate shills trying to influence governments to make sure that there will always be enough hungry mouths around to exploit. Making sure that in the future the only wage outside of their little aristocratic circle is the minimum wage. That is if they haven’t leaned heavily enough on whatever puppet governments they control at the time from eliminating even the concept of a minimum wage.

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